702 books match the query 'America' and 30 start with p
John E. Van Sant
University of Illinois Press, 2019
McTavish, Jan R.
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Pain and Profits tells the story of how a common ailment—the headache—became the center of a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry in the United States. Despite the increasing authority of the medical profession in the twentieth century, treatment of this condition has remained largely in the hands of the public. Using the headache as a case study, and advertising as a significant source of information, Jan McTavish traces the beginnings of the modern over-the-counter industry.
The American pharmaceutical industry developed from nineteenth-century suppliers of plant-derived drugs for both professional and home care. Two branches of the industry evolved over time—the ethical branch, which sold products only with prescriptions, and the nostrum branch, which was noted for its energetic marketing techniques. At the end of the century, they were joined by German companies that combined a strong commitment to science with aggressive salesmanship. Since German drugs were both highly effective in treating headaches and commonly available, sufferers wanting quick relief could easily obtain them. The result was a new kind of “legitimate” pharmaceutical industry that targeted consumers directly.
Historians of medicine as well as more general readers interested in the history of the headache will enjoy this fascinating account of the creation of the modern pharmaceutical industry.
Jan Nisbet
Brandeis University Press, 2021
Edited by Jessica Joyce Christie and Patricia Joan Sarro
University of Texas Press, 2006
Ancient American palaces still captivate those who stand before them. Even in their fallen and ruined condition, the palaces project such power that, according to the editors of this new collection, it must have been deliberately drawn into their formal designs, spatial layouts, and choice of locations. Such messages separated palaces from other elite architecture and reinforced the power and privilege of those residing in them. Indeed, as Christie and Sarro write, "the relation between political power and architecture is a pervasive and intriguing theme in the Americas."
Given the variety of cultures, time periods, and geographical locations examined within, the editors of this book have grouped the articles into four sections. The first looks at palaces in cultures where they have not previously been identified, including the Huaca of Moche Site, the Wari of Peru, and Chaco Canyon in the U.S. Southwest. The second section discusses palaces as "stage sets" that express power, such as those found among the Maya, among the Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest, and at El Tajín on the Mexican Gulf Coast. The third part of the volume presents cases in which differences in elite residences imply differences in social status, with examples from Pasado de la Amada, the Valley of Oaxaca, Teotihuacan, and the Aztecs. The final section compares architectural strategies between cultures; the models here are Farfán, Peru, under both the Chimú and the Inka, and the separate states of the Maya and the Inka.
Such scope, and the quality of the scholarship, make Palaces and Power in the Americas a must-have work on the subject.
Li, Stephanie
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Jack C. Westman, M.D.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
Clara Jean Mosley Hall
Gallaudet University Press, 2018
Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Rafael Suarez and Ciprian F. Ardelean
University of Utah Press, 2018
Apple, Rima
Rutgers University Press, 2006
Parenting today is virtually synonymous with worry. We want to ensure that our children are healthy, that they get a good education, and that they grow up to be able to cope with the challenges of modern life. In our anxiety, we are keenly aware of our inability to know what is best for our children. When should we toilet train? What is the best way to encourage a fussy child to eat? How should we protect our children from disease and injury?
Before the nineteenth century, maternal instinct—a mother’s “natural know-how”—was considered the only tool necessary for effective childrearing. Over the past two hundred years, however, science has entered the realm of motherhood in increasingly significant ways. In Perfect Motherhood, Rima D. Apple shows how the growing belief that mothers need to be savvy about the latest scientific directives has shifted the role of expert away from the mother and toward the professional establishment. Apple, however, argues that most women today are finding ways to negotiate among the abundance of scientific recommendations, their own knowledge, and the reality of their daily lives.
David Román
Duke University Press, 2005
The performances that Román analyzes range from localized community-based arts events to full-scale Broadway productions and from the controversial works of established artists such as Tony Kushner to those of emerging artists. Román considers dances produced by the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg in the mid-1990s as new aids treatments became available and the aids crisis was reconfigured; a production of the Asian American playwright Chay Yew’s A Beautiful Country in a high-school auditorium in Los Angeles’s Chinatown; and Latino performer John Leguizamo’s one-man Broadway show Freak. He examines the revival of theatrical legacies by female impersonators and the resurgence of cabaret in New York City. Román also looks at how the performing arts have responded to 9/11, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the second war in Iraq. Including more than eighty illustrations, Performance in America highlights the dynamic relationships among performance, history, and contemporary culture through which the past is revisited and the future reimagined.
Alison Townsend
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009
In Persephone in America, Alison Townsend deftly weaves autobiography with myth in this reinvention of the tale of Demeter and Persephone as seen from the modern woman’s perspective. Fraught with emotional honesty, this captivating collection of lyrical and narrative poems chronicles the struggles of the figurative Persephone in three parts—the abduction, descent to the underworld, and return. Townsend turns a shrewd eye to her own experiences, as well as to the lives of other women, to offer an unflinching yet deeply compassionate exploration of such themes as girlhood and the vulnerability of the motherless; the demons of depression, addiction, and abuse; as well as passion, aging, and celebration of the natural world.
Although the poems traverse dark emotional territory at times, the picture that emerges ultimately is one of revelation and wisdom. Persephone in America is above all a journey of the soul, following the narrator as she explores what it means to be a woman in America, at times descending into darkness, only to emerge into redemption and realize “time’s sweet and invincible secret—that everything repeats—and we watch it.” Townsend’s candid portrait of female loss and discovery seeks to illuminate the truths inherent in myth, and the awakenings that hide in our darkest moments.
Persephone, Pretending(Madison, Wisconsin)
When the news says that the girl
who had been missing almost four days,
only to be found in a marshy area
at the edge of our medium-sized city,
was faking it all along, I wondered
what made her do it. I'd seen
her face—bright smile, dark eyes—
on a flier masking-taped to a pillar
at the airport the week before,
felt the involuntary frisson
of the curious, then only fear
at the thought of a girl abducted
in this place once voted
"America's most livable city."
She must have wanted
something she couldn't name,
that good girl with good grades
who looks like so many girls
in my own classes, but who keeps
changing her story. It happened
here; no, it happened there; no,
I really just wanted to be alone.
Then she turns her face away,
tired of telling her tale,
not sure what to make up next
or where invention will take her.
“Fictitious victimization disorder,”
Time magazine claims, but I wonder
what else, imagining her in the marsh,
cold, unrepentant, powerless, her mind
gone muddy with lack of sleep,
no way out of this lie she almost
believes, or the lies ahead,
nothing but memory of the rope,
duct tape, cough medicine,
and knife she bought at the PDQ
with her own cash, wanting
to be taken by someone so badly,
she takes us, she does it to herself.
Richard deCordova
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Jordana Dym
University Press of Colorado, 2007
Maria Clara Bingemer
Catholic University of America Press, 2021

Paul Buhle, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1987
Popular Culture in America was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This book collects some of the best work from the journal Cultural Correspondence (1975–83), which editor Paul Buhle calls "the first political journal of culture to assume its readers (and writers) watched television." The twenty-four contributors are part of a new generation of cultural critics and historians who are self-conscious products of the mass culture of the fifties and sixties. Their work attempts to update an elementary democratic principle - that people seek understanding and solutions, real or fanciful, through the mechanisms available to them. Although these writers condemn the manipulative qualities of commercial culture, they just as vehemently reject most of what has passed for Marxist (or liberal or conservative) orthodoxy on popular culture. Americans, they argue, have had a unique opportunity as well as a unique need to make the most of popular culture; the collective cultural experience is our only shared past. The richness and vitality of that culture is the focus of this book.
The thirty-four essays work toward an understanding of American mass culture not through abstraction but by exploring the real pleasures of ordinary people's lives. Pulp literature (utopian and horror themes, sports and nurse novels, and contemporary science fiction); radio thrillers; TV horror movies: television evangelists; sitcoms; music (polka, country-western, blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll); comic strips (Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Zippy); women's humor—these and other topics are given sensitive, detailed—sometimes humorous—attention. Paul Buhle's essay, "The 1960s Meet the 1980s," discusses popular culture scholarship, drawing on a wide range of theory—the Frankfort School, art history, literary criticism, and social science approaches. Buhle argues for the importance of this scholarship as a way of understanding "that missed connection between the cultural promise of a richly diverse, democratic society and the reality at hand."

Peter W. Williams
University of Illinois Press, 1989
"Williams provides a thought-provoking overview of popular religion in America that will intrigue specialist and student alike. . . . He has both answered many questions and raised important new ones on the nature and development of American popular religion." --Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
"Pioneering. . . . I for one am glad he combined scholarship and chutzpah for this modestly immodest first word." --Catholic Historical Review
Azcona Pastor
University of Nevada Press, 2003
Donald N. Levine
University of Chicago Press, 2006
It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. In Powers of the Mind, former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times.
He does so by defining basic values of modernity and then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles he favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, Powers of the Mind constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world.
Candice Amich
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Marquis de Nadaillac, with a new introduciton by Jon Muller
University of Alabama Press, 2005
C. Morgan Grefe and Megan Cullen Tewell
University of Massachusetts Press, 2027
Examining how former prisons became tourist destinations and what that means for past, present, and future carceral spaces
Beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. War on Drugs and tougher crime policies drove incarceration rates to unprecedented levels, leading to severe prison overcrowding and a surge in prison construction. As new facilities opened, many older prisons, some dating to the nineteenth century, were closed and abandoned. Communities faced difficult decisions about their future. Demolition was expensive, and adaptive reuse was often constrained by the distinctive architecture of confinement.
One response, often inspired by the success of institutions such as Alcatraz Island and Eastern State Penitentiary, has been to preserve former prisons as historic sites and tourist attractions, welcoming visitors and using tours and exhibits to shape public understanding of incarceration. Today former prisons operating as such exist in every region of the United States. For many visitors, these sites provide a primary point of contact with the history and realities of imprisonment.
Yet transforming places of confinement into destinations for tourism and heritage raises important questions. How should these sites interpret difficult histories? For whom? What responsibilities do they have to the formerly incarcerated, previous staff, and affected communities? How can they balance education, commemoration, entertainment, and economic development?
Preserving Punishment offers the first sustained historical study of prison museums in the United States. Examining how these institutions preserve, interpret, and present the history of incarceration, C. Morgan Grefe and Megan Cullen Tewell highlight the role of preservationists and public historians in shaping narratives, addressing ethical challenges, and fostering critical engagement with America's past and present systems of punishment. Grounded in local and regional contexts, they argue that historic prison sites are uniquely positioned to encourage informed public conversations about incarceration, memory, and criminal justice.
Michael A. Hallett
University of Illinois Press, 2006

LeRoy Lad Panek
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
American crime fiction has developed into writing that has a commitment to democracy and the democratic way of life, a compassion and empathy and a style which has created a significant branch of American literature.
By Bradley Robert Rice
University of Texas Press, 1977
Although the commission government movement is often treated by historians as an element of the reform surge of the Progressive Era, this is the first full-scale study of the origins, spread, and decline of the commission idea.
Commission government originated in Galveston, Texas, where business leaders conceived the plan as a temporary measure to speed recovery from the great hurricane of 1900. Other cities in Texas and across the nation soon followed; by 1920, about 500 municipalities had adopted the plan in which elected representatives serve as heads of city departments and, collectively, as a policy-making body.
Beginning with Galveston and Houston and Des Moines, Iowa, Bradley Robert Rice presents detailed case studies of the earliest commission cities and shows how the plan was developed and modified to suit each community’s needs. He goes on to chronicle the adoption of the commission plan by other cities across the country that strove for “businesslike efficiency” as a reaction against corruption and machine politics in urban government. Most commission charters included a wide-ranging package of municipal reforms, such as the short ballot, at-large representation, nonpartisanship, civil service, and direct legislation. Yet Rice shows that the commission plan generally offered little in the way of social reform to accompany its reorganization of municipal government.
Applying a model of innovation diffusion, the author analyzes how and why the new form of city government spread across Progressive Era America. He also thoroughly explores the relationship between the commission plan and other Progressive Era reforms and reports on the reasons for its decline from both a social and a practical perspective.
Progressive Cities is described by Professor Bruce M. Stave, editor of the Journal of Urban History, as “a sound piece of work which should make a useful and worthwhile contribution to the existing scholarship on urban reform and should appeal to an audience which cuts across disciplines: history, political science, urban studies and urban planning.”
Mark Lloyd
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Lloyd demonstrates that despite the persistent hope that a new technology (from the telegraph to the Internet) will rise to serve the needs of the republic, none has solved the fundamental problems created by corporate domination. After examining failed alternatives to the strong publicly owned communications model, such as antitrust regulation, the public trustee rules of the Federal Communications Commission, and the underfunded public broadcasting service, Lloyd argues that we must re-create a modern version of the Founder’s communications environment, and offers concrete strategies aimed at empowering citizens.
William M. Epstein
University of Nevada Press, 2006
A provocative look at America on the couch.In Psychotherapy as Religion, William Epstein sets out to debunk claims that psychotherapy provides successful clinical treatment for a wide range of personal and social problems. He argues that the practice is not a science at all but rather the civil religion of America, reflecting the principles of radical self-invention and self-reliance deeply embedded in the psyche of the nation. Epstein begins by analyzing a number of clinical studies conducted over the past two decades that purport to establish the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic treatments. He finds that each study violates in some way the standard criteria of scientific credibility and that the field has completely failed to establish objective procedures and measurements to assess clinical outcomes. Epstein exposes psychotherapy’s deep roots in the religious and intellectual movements of the early nineteenth century by demonstrating striking parallels between various types of therapy and such popular practices as Christian Science and spiritualism. Psychotherapy has taken root in our culture because it so effectively reflects our national faith in individual responsibility for social and personal problems. It thrives as the foundation of American social welfare policy, blaming deviance and misery on deficiencies of character rather than on the imperfections of society and ignoring the influence of unequal and deficient social conditions while requiring miscreants to undergo the moral reeducation that psychotherapy represents. This is a provocative, brilliantly argued look at America on the couch. Psychotherapy as Religion is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and current state of mental health.
Edited by Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin
University of Illinois Press, 2023
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself.
Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni
Tracy L. Brown
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Bruce Western
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006